Teen surfers save two from drowning near Vilano jetty

His board under his arm, 16-year-old surfer and St. Augustine High School student John Coleman hit the shore break at the Vilano Inlet at a hard sprint.

But he wasn't returning to the surf to catch the point's scattered gnarly barrels before sunset on Tuesday. He was instead hurrying to contend with some powerful memories and to save the life of a drowning teen who had drifted into the inlet and was screaming for help.

Coleman's friend, fellow surfer and SAHS student Sean Gillespie, 15, was right behind him. After telling a beachgoer to telephone for help, he dashed into the water with his board and paddled into the outgoing waters of the inlet.

By that time, Coleman was closing in on his target, St. Johns Technical High School student Justin Newman, 16, who was showing signs of fatigue.

"My instinct was to save him," Coleman said. "He was going down and up like a bobber. When I got about ten feet from him he goes under and I knew he wasn't coming back up."

Coleman dove deep, descending further and further into the murkiness until his fingertips touched hair. And at that moment, Coleman said, he decided he couldn't allow what had happened to his father to happen again.

Coleman's father, waterman William H. Coleman Jr., suffered a heart attack and drowned in 2001 after his boat capsized 40 miles from the St. Augustine shore.

"The ocean took him," the younger Coleman said in phone interview Wednesday.

The death of his father came on the heels of his mother, Margaret White, of St. Augustine, being attacked by a 12-foot bull shark. The beast took a chunk of her calf but spared her life.

Neither event gave the younger Coleman a fear of the water. Instead, he said, it instilled in him a respect for both God and what he called the "spirit of the ocean." And on Tuesday memories of his father and what happened to his mother filled him with a rigid determination to save the life of a drowning person.

"I was like, 'I can't let this kid die. He can't die on me.'" Coleman said. "I just wrapped my arms around him and brought him up."

But it was too late.

"He wasn't breathing," Coleman said. "So I put him on my surfboard and hit him as hard as I could on the back with my hand."

"I pulled my leash off my ankle and gave it to John," Gillespie said in a phone interview Wednesday. "He's kicking and I'm paddling and slowly but steadily we get in towards shore."

On shore the surfers met confusion after the teen they had just saved began pleading for them to do the same for his girlfriend.

"The only thing he said was 'girlfriend,'" Coleman said. "When he said that we were all freaking out."

Coleman and Gillespie scanned the waters to discover fellow St. Augustine High School student Suzanne Cathcart, 16, clinging to the outermost rocks of the jetty.

Gillespie reacted immediately.

"She's clinging to the rocks and every time a wave comes it's pushing her into them," he said.

Leaving the exhausted Coleman and Newman on the shore, Gillespie swam out to Cathcart, who told him she couldn't swim.

"I grabbed her and started pulling her out and she kind of grabbed me," he said. "She was pushing me down. I started swimming across when I felt the edge of the sandbar with my feet and I kicked off it and pulled her over into the shallow water and then pulled her in."

Shortly after the two reached the beach, St. Johns County Fire Rescue and life guards arrived on the scene and started treating the various cuts sustained by Cathcart, who had been repeatedly grated by the oyster shell-encrusted coquina boulder to which she had clung.

Cathcart and Newman were transported to the hospital where the latter spent the night.

Cathcart said she was grateful to Gillespie and Coleman for saving their lives.

"I'd would really like to thank them," she said in a phone interview. "Neither one of us know how to swim ... and we got caught up in the tide. If it wasn't for them we probably both would have drown."

Coleman's mother, Margaret White, said in a phone interview Wednesday that she attributed the happy ending at least in part to a higher power.

"We say that the spirit of the ocean and ocean-lovers won again," she said.

The former may have played a part but without the latter things would have definitely turned out differently, Gillespie said.

"No one else was doing anything. They were just standing around on the beach watching," he said. "Those two would have died if we weren't there."